Tag Archives: PCL

Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from the Libraries’ Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship to encourage and inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.

A poem in its printed form can feel complete and final. What I have learned, though, about poetry as both a reader and writer is that it is never linear. I don’t usually read a book of poems from start to finish – I jump around the book, pull phrases here and there. Writing poetry is even more complicated. A poem may start on a scrap of paper or in the Notes app on my phone. I may rewrite it by hand, then type it out again on my laptop. Drafting is never done in one sitting.

While every writer has their own process, I suspect many poets will admit to a similarly messy approach to drafting. And what if you could witness that process in real time? Poet, artist, and UT MFA student Annelyse Gelman and her collaborator, software programmer Jason Gillis-Grier, seek to answer that question through their delightful new poetry journal Midst.

Midst, which launched its inaugural issue in December 2019, provides readers a time-lapse view of a poem’s drafting process. Readers can watch the entire process from start to finish, or move around the timeline by rewinding or fast-forwarding. Each version of the poem is time-stamped, demonstrating that poems do not just magically appear but rather are the product of weeks, or even months, of work. This peek into the lengthy process of editing is intentional. Gelman and Gillis-Grier state on the journal’s website that they hope that Midst will demystify poetry and make it more accessible by showing the reader the writing process.

An early draft of Jenny Qi’s “When This Is All Over” in the Midst time-lapse web player (top). Compare it to Qi’s final draft (bottom). The Midst web player allows you to move along the timeline of a poem’s drafting process, so you can compare early drafts to the final poem.

Gelman and Gillis-Grier have plans to expand the project with the Midst app, which will allow poets to capture their drafting process and then submit their time-lapse poem to the journal. Right now, featured writers are nominated and invited to submit versions, but with the app, they can open up the journal to a wider audience of writers and readers directly.

And Gelman and Gillis-Grier haven’t limited their creative poetry projects to just Midst. They also recently debuted the web app Relineator, in collaboration with UT English graduate student Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth and the UT Digital Writing & Research Lab. Relineator allows poets and students to enter poems and see them reformatted with new line breaks.

A fun re-interpretation of William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow,” reformatted in the Relineator app.

April is National Poetry Month. While this year’s celebration is marked with a more somber tone due to the global pandemic, it also feels fitting to enjoy poetry from home through experimental, interactive projects like Midst and Relineator. If this has inspired you to further explore poetry, April is the best time of year to do it! Take a look at this curated selection of poetry ebooks on the UT Poetry Center’s guide. Once our print collections open again, you can find Annelyse Gelman’s book Everyone I Love is a Stranger to Someone and many other great collections of contemporary poetry at the Poetry Center’s physical location in the Perry-Castañeda Library.

No one can claim that our student leaders are filling token positions.

Student Government President Thor Lund and VP Wills Brown campaigned last year on two primary platform positions, one of which had direct bearing on the Libraries: 24-hour service at the Perry-Castañeda Library.

As of today, the incredibly industrious team can check that particular item off of their to-do list, at least for this year.

In mid-October, a week before midterms, the PCL will be open for 24 hours, 5 days-a-week until the end of the semester — during the time that students see access to a safe, secure study space a priority for their academic work. “24/5” picks back up before spring midterms and follows the same pattern to round out the school year.

Lund and Brown — along with support from SG staff — didn’t play around while most of their fellow students were on break. The pair worked with Libraries administration to target and solicit enough resources across campus for the funding of a one-year pilot of 24/5.

Not content to let temporary funding rest, Lund, Brown and staffers will be working over the course of the year to find permanent funding for the program.

Their hard work makes us proud to be Longhorns.

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Beginning in mid-October, PCL will open at noon on Sundays and remain open through 11 p.m. on Fridays. PCL will be open from 9 a.m. – 11 p.m. on Saturdays.

The days get shorter in more ways than you can imagine this time of the year, especially around the university campus as the final push of the semester evinces itself in the form of projects, papers and tests.

The Libraries does its part to help minimize the stress with a program meant to promote those resources and services that make the tasks at hand a tad less imposing.

This year’s Crunch Time outreach initiative highlighted library services and resources for students at The University of Texas at Austin between the hours of 11am-3pm on November 9, 10 &11. The program purpose is to promote the availability of in-person, drop-by assistance, subject librarian consultations, and the UT Libraries Ask a Librarian IM and email services.

During Crunch Time students are provided with Ask a Librarian contact cards attached to mini-Nestle Crunch bars, a series of time saving handouts and increased staffing at service points. A brief survey to determine awareness of service options is made available from UT Libraries computer workstations across the campus, and students who participate are entered in a prize drawing.

First introduced by the Reference and Information Services department at UT’s Perry-Castaneda Library in 2008, Crunch Time has become an annual event and three additional UT Libraries locations participated this year, increasing its reach.

Statistics indicate that students took advantage of the program and more of them were connected with the information they wanted, at point of need, as a result. Of the three locations reporting, there were 536 queries, with a large number of those (199) occurring on Wednesday, November 10, at the Perry-Castañeda (105) and Fine Arts (94) Libraries. There were also 193 participants in the services web survey.

Jenifer Flaxbart is Head of Reference & Information Services for the University of Texas Libraries.

After a successful turn last year, the Libraries are bringing back the Libraries’ Fair on the plaza at the Perry-Castañeda Library as its contribution to Research Week 2010.

The ten campus branches of the University of Texas Libraries will converge at the PCL to provide a one-stop shop for students to drop by and learn about resources and services available to them across the campus. Staff from the libraries will be on hand to answer questions, and booths will feature games for prizes and food provided by Cornucopia Popcorn Creations and Prufrock’s Java City.

The Fair saw great success in its first installment last year, attracting roughly one thousand attendees and generating increased awareness for services and study space around campus. Again this year, the Fair has been scheduled to coincide with the Longhorn Research Bazaar across the street at Gregory Gym, providing students the chance to get information about undergraduate research opportunities at the university, as well as the resources behind that research, all within the distance of a stone’s throw.

Research Week is a campus-wide celebration of undergraduate research and creative activity. It unites existing programs, events and activities that showcase undergraduate research and creative activity and highlights the many research opportunities available to students.